BACKGROUND
Social media is used as a source of information and platform to discuss healthcare, however there is little research on discussion of telehealth in social media. The impact of COVID-19 on telehealth-related social media discourse may provide insights into how telehealth is characterized online.
OBJECTIVE
This study used natural language processing tools and two social media platforms (i.e., Twitter and Reddit) to (1) assess the frequency of telehealth- and telemedicine-related posts prior to and during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) characterize each platform’s telehealth-related posts according to themes.
METHODS
We collected social media posts from Twitter and Reddit that included “telehealth” or “telemedicine”. The themes of the corpus were extracted using hashtags and Latent Dirichlet Allocation and were analyzed using descriptive statistics.
RESULTS
Both Twitter and Reddit showed exponential growth in the use of the terms “telehealth” and “telemedicine” in early 2020. The word “telehealth” is used more commonly in both Twitter and Reddit. The use of #telehealth and #covid in Twitter coincided however the #covid usage decreased more rapidly than #telehealth. Reddit Latent Dirichlet Allocation clusters showed greatest usage of “telehealth” when associated with using or suggesting telehealth for receiving therapy, counseling, or psychoanalysis.
CONCLUSIONS
Twitter and Reddit had extensive growth in the use of telehealth-related terms after the COVID-19 pandemic. Telehealth-related terms are used at a higher rate than telemedicine. Reddit showed themes connecting COVID-19 to telehealth especially in reference to therapy and counseling.